Portable electronic devices such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), wireless email devices, instant messaging devices, pagers, portable compact disk (CD) players, and portable MP3 players, and others are often forgotten, lost or stolen.
Existing wireless device loss detection approaches focus primarily on remotely programming the lost device to prohibit the device from performing certain operations, such as prohibiting the placement of phone calls, and/or instruct the device to perform certain operations, such as displaying device owner information or erasing certain data stored in the device, in an attempt to increase the user's chances of recovering the device or protecting data stored in the device. This method does not allow users to quickly recover their lost devices.
Other methods for tracking and locating a lost cell phone consist in network triangulation and GPS interrogation. This method does not allow users to instantaneously recover their lost devices.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,836,212 by Sawinski discloses a method and apparatus for reducing the likelihood of loosing a portable electronic device by monitoring inadvertent removal of a portable electronic device from its retaining device. This method does not protect users from removing their devices from their retaining devices, then losing them or forgetting them.
There is a need for a more convenient and reliable method and apparatus for alerting users upon detecting their wireless communication devices are not in the vicinity.